Pat Johnson e-mailed me finding fault with what he saw as a serious lack in an early copy of my webpage. He wrote:
As a History Teacher at a Junior college I challenge my classes to think about
the following:
Almost all the students agree. I then ask that they prove this by the number of people killed. They usually mention the Crusades and one or two other religious wars they might have heard of but in none of their examples can they come up with a million deaths. (Some experts used to teach that the Thirty Years War in Germany caused 8 million deaths, but modern experts have proved that it was more like 200 thousand and in fact the population of Germany actually increased during that war.) I then point out that most of the people who have died as a result of war, have done so in the Twentieth Century and that most of the killing was done in the name of secular (not religious) beliefs. I then ask them who is the worst of them all. Most guess Hitler. I then tell them that he is rated #3. Some then guess Stalin and I tell them that most experts place him at #2 with 20 million killed. Almost no one gets #1 who, of course, is Mao who starts with an estimated 40 million. I then point out that the top two were Communists and Hitler was a radical believer in Social Darwinism. All of these are based on atheistic beliefs.